The Old Ball Game (8 page)

The team itself was riven along Protestant-Catholic lines, which was then closer to a Sunni-Shiite breach than what passes for division in Christianity today. Fueled by an organization known as the American Protective Association, there remained a great deal of anti-Roman Catholic sentiment in the land, and the Irish on the team were naturally defensive about prejudice, real or perceived. It reveals a lot about religious feelings at that
time to know that after his success in Manila Bay—“You may fire when ready, Gridley!”—Adm. George Dewey was the most admired man in America; however, when he, a widower, married a woman who had been raised Protestant but turned Catholic, then did he instantly fall out of favor with much of mainstream America.

Religion aside, the Giants were just a generally unattractive lot. Mrs. McGraw would call them “ne'er-do-wells, knockers, shirkers and loafers.” Mathewson, the young sportsman, was at sea in their company. After his spectacular 1901, he had gotten a substantial raise to thirty-five hundred dollars, but despite pitching a shutout before an overflow crowd in the opener, he couldn't duplicate his previous year's success. As the season wore on, some of the more jealous Giants turned on him. When the clueless erstwhile scribe, Fogel, was relieved of his managerial scepter in June, Heinie Smith took formal command, whereupon some of the regulars prevailed on the new manager to remove Mathewson from the rotation and play him in the field. Stationed at first base then, they would purposely make bad throws to him, in the dirt, off the bag. Soon the finest hurler of his generation was actually being referred to in the press as, “Christy Mathewson, the former pitcher.”

Christy's yearbook photo, Bucknell, 1902

Meanwhile, McGraw's situation in Baltimore was hardly better. Before the 1902 season even began, Turkey Mike Donlin, loaded to the gills, slugged a showgirl's escort, and then when she pleaded, “Please don't hit him,” Turkey Mike popped her too. He was arrested, tried, and imprisoned—and, over McGraw's protests, he was also released by the Orioles. Such ungentle-manly behavior was not the image Ban Johnson had in mind for his league's players. Furthermore, he ordered the umpires to put the screws to Muggsy. Soon McGraw was complaining that even if an opponent merely claimed that he was being held by the belt at third, the umpire would wave him home. Rumors began to heat up that McGraw simply couldn't survive under Johnson's thumb and would have to take leave of the decency-encrusted American League. Johnson fanned the flames by saying that McGraw would be traitorous if he deserted Baltimore, and, with his dander up, the Little Napoleon replied with a wonderful historical mix-and-match. “So, the Julius Caesar of the league calls me a Benedict Arnold, does he?” Muggsy harumphed.

Then in late May things came to a boil when McGraw was spiked in a game against Detroit, suffering a three-inch gash below his left knee. In a rage, Muggsy attacked the Tiger who had injured him, smashing his jaw, before being carried off the field. McGraw's innocent bride looked on in shock. “It was the first outburst of his rage that I had seen, and it wasn't easy to watch,” she recalled. It must have been a horribly bloody scene. Johnson suspended Muggsy for five days.

The next shoe dropped on June 28 in a game against Boston, which was being umpired by McGraw's special bête noire, Tommy Connolly. After arguing with Connolly, who was standing between first and second, McGraw started back to the bench. He paused and, according to McGraw, only screamed back a warning:
“Connolly, you'd better get out of the line. Somebody will jump you and spike you.” Maybe McGraw had somewhat embellished these remarks; maybe Connolly thought there was sufficient threat inherent within them. Whatever, he tossed McGraw out of the game.

Muggsy was livid. “I used no expletives. Nor did I do anything that would warrant my being sent to the clubhouse, yet Connolly, in a most insulting way, ordered me off the field,” he explained. “I made up my mind right there that I would no longer stand for being made a dog and refused to go.” So when McGraw continued to resist departing the diamond, Connolly forfeited the game. Accordingly, two days later, Johnson suspended him again, whereupon McGraw hastened to New York and began secret discussions with Andrew Freedman. Publicly he called the American League “a loser,” Ban Johnson “a czar,” and, for good measure, he disparaged Connie Mack's Athletics as “white elephants.”

As Muggsy's New York negotiations began to leak out, McGraw (still in his woe-is-me canine stage) lashed out even more at Johnson, saying: “I would be a fool to stay here and have a dog made of myself by a man who makes no pretense of investigating or giving a hearing to both sides.”

Johnson replied with contempt, even denying McGraw animal status. “The muttering of an insignificant and vindictive wasp,” he snorted.

That did it. McGraw was gone from Baltimore. He had loaned the Oriole franchise seven thousand dollars, and so he demanded that he either be reimbursed or released. “I acted fast,” he explained. “Someone would be left holding the bag, and I made up my mind that it wouldn't be me. I simply protected myself as any business-man would.” And, most emphatically: “I did not jump.” That was very important to him. He maintained that position all his life. Even long after he died, his wife continued to argue that her husband had done nothing wrong in departing her Baltimore. “Baseball . . . is a business. It is a man's world,” she wrote. “Perhaps a mother's savage defense of her brood might be likened to a man's battle to salvage wealth, position, power or whatever was in jeopardy at the time.”

Mathewson, McGraw and “Iron Man” McGinnity

McGraw himself also publicly declared: “I wish to assure Baltimore that in consideration of their kindness, I shall not tamper with any of the Baltimore Club's players. I would not do that, because of my friendship for the people here, and because it would not be right.”

Then, promptly, he took four players—including Iron Man McGinnity—with him to New York, so eviscerating the franchise that Baltimore had to forfeit a game. Good grief, he even seduced Tom Murphy, the canny groundskeeper, into taking his gardening magic to the Polo Grounds. The
New York Sun
flatly called the
Giants “the Baltimorized New Yorks.” The
Sporting News
was no less distracted by McGraw's claims, characterizing him as “the Aguinaldo of base ball.” Since Aguinaldo was a Filipino rebel who had been a special thorn in the American army's side, that was pretty harsh stuff, in the modern range of naming someone the “Osama bin Laden of baseball.”

Meanwhile, back in Mobtown, Ban Johnson invoked league rules and gleefully took over the Oriole franchise, which is what he had wanted to do all along. By next season, 1903, he would have a whole team of Baltimorized New Yorks in his own league. They would be called the Highlanders at first, but would become somewhat better known under their subsequent sobriquet, the Yankees.

McGraw and Johnson never exchanged another word as long as they lived.

The Giants were on a western swing when McGraw officially took over the club on July 17. He accepted an $11,000 contract, the highest in the sport to that time, topping his own record $10,000 salary with St. Louis. Promptly he cleaned house, cutting loose nine of the team's twenty-three players. Freedman was apoplectic, since this meant having to eat $14,000 in salaries, but he had signed over authority to McGraw, and Muggsy unabashedly took charge. If there had been any doubt on Freedman's part, this probably sealed his decision to get out of the baseball business. Tammany had been kicked out of power in the previous November's election, and Freedman realized that he no longer possessed the authority to prohibit the construction of a new ballpark, which had previously been a key factor in keeping the American League out of New York. It was bad enough that Brooklyn had a franchise to rival his Giants, but now another competitor loomed in Manhattan.

The team was just as shook up at McGraw's hovering presence as was the owner. “The New-Yorks are suffering from nervousness
in anticipation of the coming of manager McGraw,” wrote the
World's
baseball reporter. “It is said that some of the men are dissipating, which accounts for the miserable play of the team.”

Mathewson himself was back at the pitcher's rubber, having played his last game at first base on July 1, but when Muggsy's purge began, a rumor started flying that McGraw was going to offload Matty to St. Louis. Wrote the
Tribune:
“It is said that Mathewson, the pitcher [at least he was no longer 'the former pitcher'], may be allowed to go, as it is believed that he and McGraw are not on the best of terms.” Matty allowed as how that was all news to him, but given the two men's contrasting personalities, it is certainly understandable that there was an assumption that he couldn't tolerate his new manager. As for McGraw, he never so much as contemplated getting rid of Mathewson. On the contrary, he called Matty's brief exile from pitching “sheer insanity,” adding that “any man who did that should be locked up.”

And then the Baltimorized Giants returned from their western road swing to the Polo Grounds, and, essentially, baseball began for real in the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York. For his first game as Giants' manager on Saturday, July 19, 1902, McGraw started the redoubtable McGinnity. After a succession of handfuls for crowds, suddenly a throng of sixteen thousand materialized, almost filling the park. McGraw placed himself at shortstop and went one-for-three. “It is impossible for the aggressive little baseball expert to keep out of the game,” the
Times
noted, and the other papers, which had been lacerating the Giants for years, suddenly were in his thrall. Even though the Giants lost 4–3, there was, it seems, overnight, a whole new spirit discernible from the press box. “The old-time Baltimore ginger infused by McGraw held out to the end,” the
World
cheered. The other hard-boiled diamond journalists joined the joyful chorus.

McGraw always understood how to work the press. Sports pages had begun to flourish back in the 1880s shortly before McGraw came into the game, and so he sort of grew up with
them. He knew how to reel out just enough of the skinny to convince the writers that they were his confidants; also, he trusted them with selected inside tidbits. “I have never known a baseball reporter to violate a secret,” he declared near the end of his career. Indeed, one time in spring training, when his irresponsible pitcher Bugs Raymond appeared to have broken his promise and fallen off the water wagon, McGraw convened a secret jury of writers to deliver a verdict on the matter. They did. They adjudged Raymond guilty but, co-opted by being inducted into the Giants' judicial process, none of them wrote a word about Bugs's fall from grace.

Before McGraw came to New York, of course, Freedman had made sure that the Giants endured the worst possible press from the score or so papers in town. Worse, the Giants could be almost ignored. At that time, when athletic professionalism was still not altogether accepted, it was not uncommon for the papers to devote almost as much space to college baseball games as to the pros. College football was heavily reported in the autumn, although on a regular basis, horse racing got the biggest play of all; in the upscale broadsheets, there was also extended coverage of regattas. The new sport of auto racing spilled over into both the society pages, to report on the swells in attendance, and the news pages, where speed and death (or the threat thereof) has always commanded a broad audience. But major league baseball was a staple, even if the coverage was often captious and dismissive, and usually written in so rococo a style that, looking back, the critic Jonathan Yardley observed: “The sports pages seemed to be a bad dream by Sir Walter Scott.”

The newspaper custom bothered to identify the players only by their last names. By the same token, the writers themselves were almost never given bylines. (The most famous was Bat Masterson, the old gunslinger, who had decamped to New York earlier in '02, having hung up his six-shooters to become both a deputy U.S. marshal, as appointed by Teddy Roosevelt, and a
sports columnist with the
Morning Telegram
. Masterson's sports specialty was boxing, though.)